


Seventy Years of Sleep

by future_fangirl



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Experimental Style, F/M, Multiple Timelines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-12-14 01:20:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21007343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/future_fangirl/pseuds/future_fangirl
Summary: This is a story. It is a story that begins at the end and ends at the beginning. It is a love story but not a love story that always ended well. It depends on the timeline. It depends on the choices. And I didn’t always make the right choices. I am, like of all of us, so prone to making the wrong ones.





	Seventy Years of Sleep

Seventy Years of Sleep

Love,  
Time stops, doesn’t it?  
Are we not testaments to this?  
Two old, misplaced souls,  
Asleep for seventy years?  
So close your eyes, love.  
Maybe seconds can be minutes  
and minutes can be hours  
and hours can be unending eternities  
Where I don’t have to open my eyes  
To a reality without you.  
So, let’s sleep.  
Let the world go to hell.

For we deserve a soft epilogue, my love.  
We are good people, and we’ve suffered enough.  
We Sleep, and Maybe We'll Wake Up by Nikka Ursula

"Aren’t all the good stories  
always like this?  
Passed from one mouth to another  
with one or two things melting into the tongues  
of those who preach the sanctified word.  
Forever lost,  
altered history.

We’re seventy years worth of good stories  
and for seventy years, many have tried to tell them.  
But somehow in all the madness  
of good people and bad people  
of right and wrong  
they forgot to tell the story of how much I love you.

As if the heavy slope of my shoulders  
doesn’t write a hundred paragraphs.  
As if the way I look at you  
doesn’t write the singular ending.

You are my epilogue,  
my prologue,  
and every chapter that exists in between.

Everybody, sit down.

I have a story to tell."  
Stories by Nikka Ursula

Once I wrote a journal. Rather, I should say, another version of me wrote a journal. But I did not write it. I only delivered it. But this is not a journal. This is a story. It is a story that begins at the end and ends at the beginning. It is a love story but not a love story that always ended well. It depends on the timeline. It depends on the choices. And I didn’t always make the right choices. I am, like of all of us, so prone to making the wrong ones.  
Our story was not always a love story. It didn’t always end in smiles and kisses. Sometimes it ended in harsh words and tears and shouts. But always our stories were intertwined. Always we were together, even when the only emotion that kept us together was anger. That may sound unromantic. But most of life is formed up of these moments, the many times we slammed the door, the times we made the safer choice, the time we waste on nothing in particular.  
You say, “You have lived a long life, you have been married fifty years.” I say, “There was always a timeline where we were never married, where we never even met. There was always a timeline where the speck of dust that makes us up never formed. There is always a timeline where we were never a we.” That is why we must be careful to live our lives knowing that there are no real do-overs, that we are bound only to time. 

i. 2012  
A woman walks out of a car along the sand dunes and is murdered. A man grieves. The world moves on.  
A woman walks out of a car along the sand dunes and lives. A man dies. The world blows up.  
A man goes back and kills a woman. He dies. The world does not blow up. 

ii. 2014  
A woman meets a man in a bar to give him the start of everything. The world goes on. Somewhere, some version of her has a sister. Somewhere, some version of her has a fiancé. Somewhere, some version of her has a sick mother. All of these things are true.

iii. 2016  
A woman walks into a waiting room. She is tired and frustrated. She sits down. She sees a man. He appears asleep.  
She asks “Are you asleep?”  
“No, ma’am.” She is annoyed.  
“Do you know why we are here?”  
“No, ma’am.”  
Frustrated, she snaps, “Being that we are the same age, you might as well stop calling me ma’am.”  
His eyes open and he smirks at her as if the sight of her pleased his eyes.  
If this were a different kind of story I would say it was love at first sight. But it is not. At first, it was antagonism and reluctant understanding, not unmixed with attraction. It was not love, not yet.

iv. Alamo  
More than one hundred years ago a woman held a man’s face in her hands and proclaimed that she needed him. By doing so, she saved his life. She saved the children who were yet unborn. She saved her own heart, though she did not know that. That woman was me. And if it makes no sense, that I would live hundreds of years and yet only be 86, then that is what happens when you don’t know your history. Of how we fought a war for history and won. But the winning only occurred in one timeline. And there are so many different histories.  
There was a timeline where she didn’t live or didn’t hold his face and he died. There were so many other endings. But the one I lived, that is the only one I can write.  
She held his face in her hands and fell in love. She was vulnerable. She was so unafraid of expressing her deep love and passion. She loved, knowing that love would never be returned.

v. A kiss  
Most good love stories begin with a kiss. A kiss in front of outlaws. A kiss that burned and whirled and dislocated. A kiss where he realized that he was not indifferent. That she mattered. But it was, after all, only a kiss.  
Only a kiss, but a kiss that woke them up. Reminded her of all that could be. Reminded him, that she was lying beside him in nothing but a thin slip, with an expressive face.  
She had so much courage. So much hope. So much love. 

vi. Hollywood  
They’d been separated by time and distance. They’d come hurtling back together after six weeks. They lived six lifetimes in six weeks, each more terrible than the last. Thinking each was dead. Lost and alone.  
And then they were in each other’s arms. Separated no longer. The long frustrating nights of longing. The desire for more. And then one day, it was frustrated no longer.  
She lay in his arms, tracing his face with gentle hands. She wondered that it wasn't a dream. That she'd fallen in love and maybe, it was returned.  
This is not the end of the story. It is only the beginning. The beginning of the tragedy.

vii. Wife  
Her. She was supposed to be dead. The wife. Real love.  
I slunk back. Ran. Knew I was not enough. I stuffed my ears and cried and drank and tried to close my heart. But it had been open so long. I had been so used to pouring out love, I didn’t know how to call it back. I didn’t know how to stop loving.  
Eventually, I must have succeeded. Hardened my heart until it no longer mattered. But my heart was gone forever. 

viii. Baby  
There was a baby. Not a real one. Not you. But my heart broke.  
I knew that I would never be a mother. And I knew that I would never love again.  
I held him in my arms, for the last time. It was goodbye. I gave up.

ix. Death  
Their team died. They lost hope. It was over.

x. Love  
He said, “I love you.” She thought, “It’s too late.”

xi. Rebirth  
They came back. Another version of them. Not one you’d recognize. They did not love each other. They did not love themselves. And you cannot love others if you cannot love some aspect of yourself. They were all hard edges, all softness gone. But they knew we could do better. 

xii. 2012, again  
There was another man. He was an easier answer. She’d resolved never to love again. But she didn’t want to be alone. She didn’t want heartbreak. She didn’t want pain. But you can’t have love without pain. So she put aside love. Her heart was gone. But she let it go. She didn’t need it. The other man didn’t want the heartless woman. So he left.  
He went to 2012. Killed the woman in the sand dunes. Died. Was memorialized in the life of a child. He had deserved a kinder fate. She was always guilty because always, she’d trapped him in an endless cycle. But to save her children, she must always go back.

xiii. North Korea  
The team was alive. The dead has risen. Hope back. Still, she could not keep her heart. He’d been careless with it and lost it along the way.  
There must have been a timeline where he died in the bombing. A timeline where she rounded that bend and did not seem him emerge with a baby in his arms. There must have been a timeline where her world really did end.  
Not this timeline, not now.  
For he emerged with the baby (not his, not hers, not yet) and it was then she knew that she would always love him, that her heart was still beating in her chest. She saw him with the baby and knew that she would have a child. His child.  
She said she loved him. They kissed as the bells rang. Time stopped for a moment.

xiv. Mistletoe  
They made up for lost time. So much time. Hundreds of years of longing. Decades of desire. The missed timelines. The others they choose because they were too afraid.  
The next morning we lay in bed, knowing as we did not before, how timelines could shift and bend and break. We knew that we could survive it.  
I held the glittering bauble in my hand, heard him say, "I have everything I need." I knew I had made the right choice.

xv. Children  
Her stomach grew round, her fears grew rounder. The terror that the children would not live. That the evil people would take them. That she would not be a good mother.  
Then they were born. And we knew that we would love you forever. That we would do anything to protect you.

xvi. 2014 again  
She gave the journal to save her children. She prayed that a god she didn’t believe in would forgive her. But she did it to save you.

xvii. Loss  
They lost their children. The timelines changed. They came home to the world where they were not supposed to love each other. That other people claimed them. But they had their memories.  
We did not forget you. We did not forget each other.  
There was a timeline where this did not happen. Where it was soccer games and broken legs and flu.

xviii. Fighting  
She grew hard and unforgiving. He lost his softness. They tore the world down. Still, they could not bring them back.

xix. Erasure  
She had to erase herself. Otherwise, they would always end there. She went back to the younger version of her. She told her the truth.  
She watched as she punched in the numbers. Went back home. The world was not in ruins. 

xx. Back at the beginning  
He did not remember her. But he loved her. She walked into his bar and drank, and he thought she was beautiful. She should not exist. She went home with him even though she was a stranger to him. He was not a stranger to her. If he couldn’t understand why she cried over a stranger, he was too entranced with her to care that she was looking at him as if she’d known him forever. They’d lived many lifetimes together.  
There was still the timeline they woke up that Christmas morning wrapped in each other arms and he gave her an ornament.  
She showed him the machine. Somehow he believed her.  
He understood why she woke up screaming, why the sounds outside sent her reeling, why she could not be still. He traced the scars on her body, scars that matched his own, and let her tell the story of you.  
You were born. 

They had a soft epilogue. They deserved it.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this story intentionally a little vague. I imagine Lucy writing this as a very old woman. It has multiple timelines.  
The timeline where Jessica dies and never returns. The Futures Timeline. The timeline we see in the movie. And another timeline where they lose the twins. Another timeline where she erases herself and has to start over with a Wyatt who doesn't know her (but is very, very in love with her). Possible even a timeline where Wyatt died in North Korea. I hope it's not too confusing. I was experimenting with different styles.  
The poems are from a Stucky fan poem. The author is so talented. They have some works on Tumblr (I don't think their works are published anywhere else).  
I'm doing this for another Lyattverse challenge. Today's been rough. I'm struggling with some ongoing health issues and it's very frustrating.


End file.
